


Only a Dancer in a Room

by ChaikaBzh



Category: Tiny Pretty Things (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mild Language, Sharing a Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28394676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChaikaBzh/pseuds/ChaikaBzh
Summary: A little love story about bodies and their places. Ballet and love alike can be cruelly discriminating in what bodies they accept, and yet how can we blame them? It is too important, sometimes, that the very best persevere and end up at the top for any mercy to come into play. I'm sure they wish for mercy, lovers and dancers and dancers' lovers, but sometimes the only mercy they can extend to one another is the mercy of giving one another a space.
Relationships: Oren Lennox & Shane McRae, Shane McRae/Tyler Stroyer
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Only a Dancer in a Room

Ty was perfectly supine even as the dark dorm room filled with Shane’s agitation. The pretend-blond boy, sitting at the foot of the bed, ran one hand through his own hair. He used his other index finger to trace the accidental waves of the loose covers, trying not to disturb them. It was a fine line and he was screwing up. Shane knew that Oren would be back any minute. Ty didn’t.  
Ty was smiling and staring at the chains of photographs over each bed. Shane’s Balanchine pointing intently at... Andrew’s? no, Oren’s, which just frowned imperiously. In the very same costume, Oren’s Nijinsky was beaming with his arms outstretched and Shane’s was looking behind his shoulder with eyebrows raised and only promises of a smile.  
Shane finally looked away from the door and craned his neck to see Ty. Their eye-contact cut through the sweaty haze, whose three strata consisted of their mutual passion, Shane’s agitation, and Ty’s contentment, each in their own localized layer. It couldn’t have lasted more than six feet. If the door opened, it couldn’t outlast that either.  
“Thanks for… thanks. Don’t tell my sister.” Ty’s voice slipping through to Shane, his headlight smile keeping Shane from turning back toward safety.   
“What a romantic you are.” Shane was proud that, despite everything, he still had sarcasm propping up his sentences despite his inner pain.   
“I can say something romantic, I say very romantic things all the time. But I’ve never meant one.”  
“Mean one, Ty.” Ty stopped smiling and used his arms to shift closer. Shane’s left leg hid his organ, but getting closer to him was still breathtaking. It occurred to Ty that arousal was really only the shadow of a body. A body as beautiful as Shane’s was too bright to have any shadows; if there were any, it was only because Shane was dimming himself for him. Remarkably calm, Ty kept smiling.  
“I’ve been in a wheelchair since I was a kid-”  
“I’m already wet.”  
“Shut up. I’m not going for that kind of romantic.”  
“Good,” Shane whispered. Ty’s admonition had brought him from guarded playfulness back into a kind of Narnia, where every law was determined by anticipation. Shane’s lips quivered at their edges, and his pupils traced Ty’s body according to their own will.  
“Shane, I’ve been in a wheelchair since I was a kid. I spent years hating every single body I saw, and mine more than all the rest combined. Shane, when I saw you dance, a weight lifted from my chest, or from my legs, really. Shane, the beauty of what you can do with your body let me forgive my body for being there to hurt.” For a fraction of a second, Shane became that effulgent Nijinsky on Oren’s side of the room. He pivoted on his hands toward Ty, then, thinking better of abandoning the door outright, shifted almost completely back to his old position.  
“Ty… Ty… Ty… what am I going to do with you? More importantly, what am I going to do with the fact that you’ve watched Neveah dance for years?”  
“But Neveah’s not”  
“Neveah is better than me. At least, she’s better than me at flying. Even someone like you can see that.” Shane stared at the door and refused to blink, afraid of what might come if he did.  
“Someone like me?”  
“Someone who isn’t a dancer. No need to get Eunice Kennedy on my ass.” Shane made the joke with a perfectly dead queer intonation.   
“Shane… Shane, don’t make jokes the way I make jokes. You don’t need to, you-”  
“I don’t need to? I don’t need to what, laugh? Or do you mean I don’t need to talk, because my body does all the talking-” Ty lunged toward Shane, obviously intending to kiss him. Unforgivably, Ty’s body failed him. Ty’s lips and tongue made a crater where Shane’s seashore games had been. Then Shane stood up.  
“Christ,” Shane began to whimper but crescendoed into a cry, “Don’t tell your sister, okay?” Ty nodded from push-up position. Shane fell against his door. Ty pushed himself up to a kneel, and the two of them got a final honest look at each other. Shane helped Ty dress.   
Shane didn’t bother dressing; he didn’t have to, he just had to move differently, and every chink in his skin was closed, even if he had no costumes to layer in. Nudity might be in the eye of the beholder, but Shane knew how to strangle true, bare, nakedness in its crib. Finally, the door was opened, Ty rolled out, and Shane sat, alone, where Ty had sat just a minute before.

Oren couldn’t sleep unless he could sweat off a few pounds first. He liked to imagine whatever fat he had boiling and popping like pop-corn, healthily shooting out from beneath from his skin at rhythms he could dance to perfectly, even though he was well aware it was just puddling where he stood. The exhausting torpor of the heat, however, along with his little percussive fantasy, was enough to run his mind ragged and ready it for sleep. A headache was gathering, and Oren wondered just how much longer he could subject his body to the same amount of flagellation.  
As he left the sauna, nothing but a thin old towel around his waist, he could have sworn he heard a slight squeaking. From the way it was fading, Oren could guess whatever was making the sound was headed toward the elevator. Peeking around the corner he saw a figure in a hoodie on a wheelchair where he expected nothing but a rat cleverly leaving. For a moment, one he immediately deemed stupid and sleep-deprived, he wondered if Celia might have been pushed by someone in a wheelchair. Then he shook his head. Though Shane had taught the ballet-prince to give the benefit of the doubt to those around him over the years, he was pretty damn certain people in wheelchairs couldn’t do that much damage or, more importantly, escape down steep, iron fire escapes  
As Oren knocked softly on his door to see if Shane was still awake or not, he eyed the stark difference between the lettering of their name markers. Oren shook his head. They weren’t as different as the lettering suggested.  
Oren was shaken from his amicable reverie by a low moan from inside. When Oren tried to push open the door with his shoulder he met a sharp resistance, but one which yielded in less than a second.  
“O, it’s only you,” sounded a disturbed yet passive voice. Shane had crumpled inches away from Oren’s feet, separated by the now hollow doorway. In a kind of obsequy, Oren threw his towel toward his bed, bent down, scooped up Shane’s body, closed the door with his legs, and propped Shane against it. Then, Oren pressed their beds together in the middle of the room, replacing their common space with a roughly queen-sized bed detached from either of their photo-covered walls and directly in the light of the window. Rumors of dawn cast almost imperceptible shadows and turned their bedframes into bars like those of a prison or a score.  
“My sheets are wet,” Shane mumbled.  
“You couldn’t have had sex on the carpet like a civilized person?” Oren gently chided.  
“Carpet?” Shane fixed on the word like an infant. Shane’s eyes, whose make-up had dazzled Oren just a little bit earlier, reminding him just how much saltwater could do, were now reservoirs of tears slowly maturing into drops and trying to leave Shane’s face, which was parallel to the ground as he stared at his constant, if inconsistent, prince.  
“Beneath us,” Oren said. He laid the bedspreads so all of his would be below all of Shane’s wet ones. He prodded Shane toward their bed island and lowered him gently before following him. Instantly, Shane turned away and looked back at his iconostasis.  
“I might be crying, but I’m not so blind to think we’re doing it again.” Shane tried to muster his normal tone, but his voice was low and bankrupt.  
“No… that’s not what I’m trying... What happened?”  
“Oh… he was selfish and unserious and I was too, so I didn’t let him in.”  
“Who was he?”  
“Not important.” Oren, always ready to sacrifice truth for love, slid onto Shane’s side and tipped him onto his back so they could look right at the ceiling.  
“Do you remember…” Oren began, feeling Shane tense at the very idea of remembering anything just then, “when we first put up those photographs?”  
“I do.” Shane relaxed involuntarily. He was too tired for fear.  
“How we made Balanchine scold himself? And Nijinsky flirt with himself?” Oren knew he would keep talking until he could make Shane smile, not as a lover, but as his roommate.  
“It was so empowering, at the time, to turn all those little postcards of our heroes into jokes. Now, I just can’t stop feeling like I need them.” Oren was grateful that a slight preen was beginning to return to Shane’s voice.  
“I need those memories. I need those postcards too, right where they are.” Oren whispered it right into Shane’s ear, kissed his earlobe and his left temple, and they fell asleep like that; and the sun will shine through the window and spotlight, accidentally, the sureness of their resting place within those walls.


End file.
